The latest indie book reviews from Self-Publishing Review
Review: From Chicken Feet To Crystal Baths by Ian Mote
If Bill Bryson’s Notes From a Small Island is a love letter to the United Kingdom, then Ian Mote’s From Chicken Feet To Crystal Baths is a love letter to China. Most Westerners know little about China, and what we think we know is often wrong or at least badly incomplete. Here, Mote is our friendly, ever cheerful, indefatigable tour guide to the Middle Kingdom.
Besides being just a delightful romp, this book gives readers something travel books rarely do: a sense of the place from the POV of both tourist and resident. Mote takes us to Tiananmen Square and […]
Content warning for depictions of suicide and sexual abuse.
The delightful, whimsical cover of this book and tongue-in-cheek cover quote (“I am almost certainly going to end up in Hell”) alerts you right away to the fact that you are getting more—far more—than another of the currently popular anti-religion screeds. Boomsliter has tremendous respect, bordering on hero worship, for Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, and Sam Harris. But he wisely takes a slightly different tack in this book. Boomsliter, you see, has a sense of humor (in this he owes more to Christopher Hitchens than the triumvirate mentioned above, although Boomsliter’s wit is just a tad less acerbic than Hitchens’). […]
In the middle of the 23rd Century, the foremost military power of Earth – the United States and Nations or “USAN” – has drawn conclusion to World War IV. In the wake of victory, there are events occurring on the single human colony of Mars: there are motions in the small colony for a claim to secede. The move comes at critical time of resumed elections on Earth. Pressure to control the situation escalates circumstances quickly, the Secretary of Defense, Audrey Andrews, moves the president to send their new flagships Otus and Ephialtes to the colony as a show of […]
A Blind Thrust is the term that describes an earthquake that occurs on a fault that is hidden from view – these sorts of earthquakes can be the most destructive – and here Marquis uses this as a metaphor in his thriller mystery of the same name, in the vein of Dan Brown, but instead of religion we get science, and instead of Langdon we meet a protagonist in the form of geologist Joe Higheagle, a man passionate about his work, and the environment.
Set in 1952, Nuclear Affairs is the debut novel of author J. Albert Griffiths that explores the new and terrifying world of early post-nuclear global politics. As the US military struggles to understand and manage its own nuclear research in the first decade of the Cold War, the newly-formed United States Air Force bears numerous burgeoning roles in its struggle for legitimacy.